Twenty Things We Now Know Five Years After 9/11

Twenty Things We Now Know Five Years After
9/11

The
imminent fifth anniversary of 9/11 provides the proper
moment for a good, ol'-fashioned sum-up of the past
half-decade under CheneyBush, especially because so much
has happened in the past 12-months:

The Bush
Administration's Katrina debacle, Iraq being sucked deeper
into the civil-war vortex, Afghanistan turning once again
into a major war theater, more and more military leaders
speaking out about the disaster that is CheneyBush foreign
policy, the defection of so many moderate conservatives
from their GOP home, the plummeting of Bush's popularity to
not much more than his fundamentalist base, the revelation
that Bush&Co. have been spying on citizens' phone calls and
emails without court warrants, the indictment of
CheneyBush's chief aide Scooter Libby for obstruction of
justice in the case of the White House's outing of a covert
CIA agent, the "rendering" of detainees abroad for extreme
torturing, etc. etc.

I'll get to the annual list in a
moment. But first let's step back and take a deeper
overview. Buckle your seat belts, here we go.

WHAT
9/11 PERMITTED BUSH TO DO

Whatever you may think of
9/11, and the extent of involvement of Bush&Co., it's
crystal-clear that the events of that tragic day were and
continue to be used as an excuse for a wide variety of
immoral and illegal actions by the CheneyBush
Administration. The radical agenda that was barely on the
public's horizon five years ago has since become all too
evident, both domestically and in terms of foreign/military
policy, which is why so many traditional conservatives are
abandoning the extremism of the Republican Party.

Launching a war against, and then occupying, Iraq is the
most obvious foreign result of the 9/11 tragedy -- even
though Bush has admitted several times that there was no
connection between Iraq and 9/11, and no WMD either. In one
of the worst strategic mistakes in modern American foreign
policy, the war against the al-Qaida terrorists in
Afghanistan was precipitously abandoned and U.S. troops were
dispatched to Iraq, a country of no real threat to the
U.S.

Domestically, the near-3000 deaths of 9/11 -- and,
let us not forget, the spreading of deadly anthrax spores
around the halls of Congress by someone still unknown --
led to the passage of the so-called "Patriot" Act. This
collection of martial provisions gave the federal government
and its agents unprecedented police power to violate the
Constitution and Bill of Rights in its supposed hunt for
terrorists. All this while very little has been done to
actually make the country more secure, such as checking
containers entering ports, improving security at nuclear
and chemical plants, x-raying all air freight, and so on.

In short, Bush&Co. used and then grossly abused the awful
events of 9/11 -- and continues to do so -- in order to
expand and maintain power, to move aggressively in the
world, to pay off corporate and wealthy-individual
supporters through huge tax breaks (in the middle of a
war!), to create a one-party system of government, to neuter
the legislative and judicial branches and thus violate our
time-honored checks-and-balances system that provides a
brake on executive excesses, to amass more and more police
powers in federal hands, to effectively control the
mass-media and the vote-counting system in this country,
etc. etc.

9/11 also gave Karl Rove the fear-tools with
which to manipulate the populace whenever he wished. Rove
knows he has a lock on about 1/3 of the electorate, the
GOP's fundamentalist "base." In several elections since
9/11, he has revved up the fear machine by rolling out the
required buzzwords (abortion, terrorists, gay marriage, the
flag, illegal immigrants, Muslims, et al.) to cobble
together enough support to "win" the elections, even if by
the slimmest of margins. (In reference to those margins,
election experts have found that there is enough
statistical and experiential evidence to say with some
confidence that in key states and regions, those
balloting-results were fraudulently obtained.)

We'll
talk some about what can be done to change the situation
toward the end of this essay; right now, let's take a look
at this year's compilation of what we now know five years
after 9/11.

THE 9/11 LIST

1. The Facts of 9/11.
We know that the Bush Administration didn't want the public
to learn much, if anything, about the events of that day
five years ago. Bush&Co. had to be dragged kicking and
screaming into agreeing to the appointment of the official
9/11 Commission, and they named the executive director, one
of their made men (now an Administration
official).

As it turned out, the Administration
wasn't all that cooperative in furnishing documents, Bush
would not testify under oath and would deign to appear only
with Cheney by his side (here's my imagined transcript of
that testimony) (
http://www.crisispapers.org/essays/911-testimony.htm ) ,
and just recently we learned that the commission was so
angered by the constantly-shifting stories told by the
Pentagon/NORAD that they were ready to urge that legal
charges be filed. ( washingtonpost.com )

We
know that a growing number of academics and scientists have
raised serious questions about the official government
explanation of the 9/11 events, especially about whether
the Twin Towers fell straight down on their own or were
guided in that free-fall-speed path by pre-set explosives.
Behind all these and other conspiracy theories rests a
nagging suspicion among many Americans -- heightened by the
admission that the Pentagon lied outright to the 9/11
Commission -- that the Bush Administration may have been
complicit in helping orchestrate the 9/11 tragedies. (I do
not accept much of that surmising, but until the
Administration comes clean on a number of troublesome
questions, Bush&Co. will always be, and justifiably so,
under a cloud of suspicion for complicity. These questions
include why the Secret Service didn't immediately grab Bush
at that Florida school and get him on a plane, why NORAD
fighter-jets were MIA on that fateful morning, why airline
stocks were "shorted" just prior to the attacks. Click
here for more info on 9/11 skeptic groups. (
http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org )

We now
know -- no matter what one believes about the Bush
Administration's level of complicity in 9/11 -- that at the
very least the inner Bush circle knew that a huge al-Qaida
attack was coming in late-Summer/early-Fall, but they did
absolutely nothing to prevent it or prepare the public for
its consequences. They knew because fairly detailed,
red-hot warnings about planes being used as weapons were
supplied to the CheneyBush inner circle by numerous
countries' intelligence services around the world. But
CheneyBush didn't even call a meeting of involved advisors
and counter-terrorism honchos to move on the intel they
were getting. In short, Bush&Co. had advance word that
something "spectacular" was about to go down, and, for their
own reasons, did nothing. Indeed, when the CIA sent a
briefer to Crawford, Texas, to go over the ominously-titled
August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, "Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in U.S." -- which talked about N.Y.
buildings being cased, preparations for hijacking of
planes, terrorists in the U.S. with explosives, etc. -- Bush
barely listened and then insultingly dismissed the briefer,
saying "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

We know that Bush&Co. saw, in Condi Rice's apt
term at the time, the "opportunity" offered by the 9/11
attacks to move quickly and forcefully with the
Administration's foreign and domestic agenda. PNAC talked
about its Pax Americana plan for global "benevolent
hegemony" taking forever to implement unless a "new Pearl
Harbor" changed the equation in the public mind. 9/11 came
along and served as that "new Pearl Harbor." (See "How We
Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer.) (
http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/PNAC-Primer.htm )

2. PNAC & the Neo-Cons. We know that a FarRight
segment of the conservative movement was dedicated to using
America's sole superpower status to move aggressively in
the world while no other country or international force
could put up much resistance. The key neo-con leaders in
charge of U.S. foreign/military policy (Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, Khalilzad, et al.) were founders
of, and affiliated with, The Project for The New American
Century (PNAC).

The neo-cons realized that presidents
enjoy enormous patriotic support during wartime, but when
the war ends, those leaders lose their compelling luster,
as was the case with Bush#1. Ergo, Bush#2 would become a
PERMANENT wartime president, and those who opposed him could
then be tarred forever with the "unpatriotic" brush, and
their political opposition marginalized. And it worked: the
Democrats cowered and gave Bush virtually everything he
wanted, up until relatively recently, when occasionally
they remember they have spines in their bodies and stand up
and fight as an opposition party should.

3. Oil & the
Politics of PNAC. We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to
bring the entire country along with him when he launched an
attack on al-Qaida and its Taliban-government supporters in
Afghanistan. But there's no oil in that destitute country
-- and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not much worth bombing --
and thus no lessons could be drawn by Middle East leaders
from the U.S. attack. But, as Cheney's secret energy panel
was aware, there was another country in the region that did
have oil, and lots of it, and which could be taken easily by
U.S. forces. Thus Iraq became the object-lesson to other
autocratic leaders in the Middle East, especially in Syria
and Iran: If you do not do our bidding, prepare to accept a
massive dose of "shock&awe": You will be removed, replaced
by democratic-looking governments as arranged by the
U.S.

The neo-cons -- most of whom were members of PNAC
and similar organizations, such as the American Enterprise
Institute and Foundation for the Defense of Democracies --
had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein in 1998, but he
demurred, seeing a mostly contained dictator there, whereas
Osama bin Laden, and those terrorists like him, actually
were successfully attacking U.S. assets inside the country
and abroad.

But the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than
simply toppling a brutal dictator. Among their other
recommendations: "pre-emptively" attacking countries devoid
of imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating agreed-upon
treaties when they conflict with U.S. goals, making sure no
other nation (or organization, such as the United Nations)
can ever achieve power-parity with the U.S., installing
U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will, expressing
a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons, and so on.
All of these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as
lunatic, were enshrined in 2002 as official U.S. policy in
the National Security Strategy of the United States of
America and were renewed in Bush's 2004's National Security
Strategy.

4. Sexing Up the Intel. We know that given the
extreme nature of the neo-con agenda, the Bush
Administration had their work cut out for them in fomenting
support for an invasion and occupation of Iraq. Therefore,
among the first moves by Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to
somehow try to connect Saddam to the terror attacks. The
various intelligence agencies reported to Rumsfeld that
there was no Iraq connection to 9/11, that it was an
al-Qaida operation, but those finds were merely bothersome
impediments. Since the CIA and the other intelligence
agencies would not, or could not, supply the intelligence
needed to justify a war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own
rump "intelligence" agency, the Office of Special Plans,
stocked it with political appointees of the PNAC persuasion
and soon was stovepiping cherry-picked raw intel, much of it
untrue from self-interested Iraqi exiles, straight to Cheney
and others in the White House. Shortly thereafter, the
White House Iraq Group -- the in-house marketing cabal,
with such major players as Libby, Rove, Card, Rice, Hadley,
Hughes, Matalin, et al. -- went big-time with the WMD and
mushroom-cloud scares and the suspect melding of Saddam
Hussein with the events of 9/11.

Based on this sexed-up
and phony intelligence, Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and
the others began warning about mushroom clouds over the
U.S., drone planes dropping biological agents over the East
Coast, huge stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq, etc.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, regarded as the most
believable of the bunch, was dispatched to the United
Nations to make the case, which he did, reluctantly, by
presenting an embarrassingly weak litany of surmise and
concocted facts. While the U.S. mainstream media was
unanimous in its opinion that Powell had cinched the case,
the world didn't buy it (Powell, who resigned in 2004, has
since lamented his role in this charade), and the
opposition to the U.S. war plan was palpable and huge: 10
million citizens throughout the world hit the streets to
protest, former allies publicly criticized Bush. Only Tony
Blair in England eagerly hitched his wagon to the Bush
war-plan with large numbers of troops dispatched, as it
turned out over the objections of many of his closest aides
and advisers.

5. The Downing Street Revelations. We know
that those advisers warned Blair that he was about to
involve the U.K. in an illegal, immoral and probably
unwinnable war that would put U.K. and U.S. troops in great
danger from potential insurgent forces. How do we know about
these inner workings of the Blair government? Because
someone from inside that body leaked the top-secret minutes
from those war-Cabinet meetings, the so-called Downing
Street Memos.

We also learned from those minutes that
Bush & Blair agreed to make war on Iraq as early as the
Spring of 2002. The intelligence, they decided, would be
"fixed around the policy" to go to war, despite their
telling their legislative bodies and their citizens that no
decisions had been made. In fact, the Bush Administration
had decided to go to war a year before the invasion. "Fuck
Saddam," Bush told three U.S. Senators in March of 2002.
"We're taking him out."

We know that many of Blair's
most senior advisors thought the WMD argument rested on
shaky ground, and that the legality of the war was in
question without specific authorization from the United
Nations Security Council. But the Bush Administration
rushed to war anyway, in haste because the U.N. inspectors
on the ground in Iraq were not finding any WMD stockpiles;
the rush to war was accomplished without proper planning
and with no workable plan to secure the peace and
reconstruct the country after the major fighting. Some weeks
later, Bush prematurely declared, under a "Mission
Accomplished" banner, that the U.S. had "prevailed" in the
Iraq war.

6. The Big Lie Technique & WMD. We know (again,
thanks to the Downing Street Memos) that both the U.S. and
U.K. were well aware that Iraq was a paper tiger, with no
significant WMD stockpiles or link to Al-Qaida and the 9/11
attacks. Nevertheless, the major thrust of Bush&Co.'s
justification for going to war was based on these
non-existent weapons and 9/11 links. The Big Lie Technique,
repeating the same falsehoods over and over and over,
drummed those lies into our heads day after day, month
after month, with little if any skeptical analysis by the
corporate mainstream media, which marched mostly in lockstep
with Bush policy and thinking. Wolfowitz admitted later
that they chose WMD as the primary reason for making war
because they couldn't agree on anything else the citizenry
would accept. But frightening people with talk of nuclear
weapons, mushroom clouds, toxins delivered by drone
airplanes and the like would work like a charm. And so they
did, convincing the American people and Congress that an
attack was justified. It wasn't.

7. Iran Is Beneficiary
of U.S. Policy. We know that the real reasons for invading
Iraq had precious little to do with WMD, with Islamist
terrorists inside that country, with installing democracy,
and the like. There were no WMD to speak of, and Saddam, an
especially vicious dictator, did not tolerate religious or
political zealots of any stripe. No, the reasons had more
to do with American geopolitical goals in the region
involving oil, control, support for its ally Israel,
hardened military bases and keeping Iran from having free
rein in the region.

However, as it turned out, by
invading and occupying Iraq, it removed the one buffer
against the expansion of Iran's political and military
power in the region; in addition, because the U.S.
Occupation was so incompetently carried out, it pushed Iraq
and Iran into a far closer religious and political alliance
than would have been the case if Saddam had been permitted
to remain in power. CheneyBush may have sacrificed
thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of American
wounded, and more than 100,000 Iraqis as "collateral damage"
-- and now the Administration is quietly willing to accept
an Islamist government that may well turn out to be more
attuned to Teheran than to Washington.

8. Iraq As a
Disaster Zone. We know that Bush's war has been a thorough
disaster, built on a foundation of lies, and bunglingly
managed from the start. As a result, the Occupation has
provided a magnet for jihadists from other countries,
billions have been wasted or lost in the corrupt system of
organized corporate looting that ostensibly is designed to
speed up Iraq's "reconstruction," etc. etc. Indeed, so much
has Bush's war been botched that the "realists" in the
Administration know the U.S. must get out as quickly as
possible if they are to have any hope of exercising their
considerable muscle elsewhere in the Middle East. But, so
far, the neo-con strategy still rules, and
"stay-the-course" remains the operating principle.

9. The
Stretched-Thin Military Needs Bodies. We know that Bush's
Middle East agenda also is suffering because the U.S.
military is spread way thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, the
desertion rates are high, soldiers are not re-enlisting at
the usual clip, recruitment isn't working and illegal scams
are being used to lure youngsters into signing up. In
short, there are no forces to spare on the ground. Either a
military draft will be instituted -- and the recent call up
of thousands of ready-reserve Marines is a draft by a
different name -- or all future attacks will have to come
from air power or from missiles, which will merely deliver
a message. The air attacks will result in making the
citizens of those countries even angrier at America, and
with little likelihood of success in forging U.S.-friendly
"democratic" governments in Iran, Syria, et al., since the
bombed populations will support their existing governments.
In short, America's and Israel's failures in Iraq and
Lebanon demonstrate the limits of highly-armed powers in the
modern, nationalist-guerrillas world.

10. Hiding the
Facts from the Public. We know that Bush&Co. made sure that
there would be no full-scale, independent probes of their
role in using and abusing the intelligence that led to war
on Iraq. This is the most secretive Administration in
American history, and they want no investigations (
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/blocked_investigations.htm
) of any of their mistakes or corruptions of the democratic
process.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by
Republican Pat Roberts, held hearings on the failures lower
down the chain, namely at the CIA and FBI level, and
promised there would be followup hearings on any White
House manipulation of intelligence. But, following the 2004
election, Roberts said no purpose would be served in
launching such an investigation. Likewise, the 9/11
Commission did not delve deeply into how the Bush
Administration misused its pre-9/11 knowledge. In short,
this secretive administration made sure that everything was
done to head off at the pass any investigations
whatsoever.

11. Perilously Close to Dictatorship. We know
that Bush has no great love for legitimate democratic
processes, certainly not inside the United States. (On at
least three occasions, he has "jokingly" expressed his
preference for dictatorship, as long, he said, as he can be
the dictator.) He much prefers to rule as an oligarch, but
to do that, he had to invent legal justifications that he
could claim granted him the requisite power. So he had his
longtime lawyer-toady, Alberto Gonzales, devise a legal
philosophy that permits Bush to do pretty much what he
wants -- ignore laws on the books, disappear U.S. citizens
into military prisons, authorize torture, spy on citizens'
phone calls and emails, etc. -- whenever Bush says he's
acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime."

And,
since "wartime" is the amorphous "war on terror," from which
there is no end, Bush is home free. There always will be
terrorists trying to do anti-U.S. damage somewhere around
the globe, or inside America, and the "commander-in-chief"
will need to respond. Ergo, goes this logic, Bush is above
the law, untouchable, in perpetuity. Bush&Co. also made
sure that U.S. officials and military troops would not be
subject to indictment by any international court or
war-crimes tribunal.

Neither Gonzales, nor Bush, has
disavowed this legal philosophy of a dictator-like
President being beyond the reach of the law. No doubt the
issue ultimately will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, to
which Bush has appointed ultra-conservative Judges John
Roberts and Samuel Alito. In a chilling decision, the
appeals panel, of which Roberts was a member prior to his
ascension to the Supremes, ruled that the
Commander-in-Chief's arbitrarily-designated "enemies" are
non-persons, with no legal rights. Bush now feels free to
subject anyone he likes to the "military tribunal" system
he has concocted; even the Court's recent objections to the
tribunal system has had little effect on day-to-day
violations of detainees' rights, as Bush&Co. always manage
to postpone and delay implementation or find ways around the
court rulings.

12. Torture As Official U.S. Policy. We
know that Gonzales, then Bush's White House Counsel, and
Pentagon lawyers beholden to Rumsfeld, devised legal
rationales that make torture of suspects official state
policy. These Bush-loyalist lawyers also greatly widened
the definition of what is acceptable interrogation practice
-- basically anything this side of death or terminally
abusing internal organs. They also authorized the
"rendering" of key suspects to countries specializing in
extreme torture. After all this, Bush and Rumsfeld
professed shock, shock!, that those under their command
would wind up torturing, abusing and humiliating prisoners
in U.S. care. But the Administration made sure to stop all
inquiries into higher-up responsibility for the endemic
torture. The buck never stops on Bush's desk -- if something
goes wrong (and he never will admit to mistakes), it's
always someone else's fault.

13. The Bill of Rights Goes
"Quaint." We know that the Bush Administration has been
able to obtain whatever legislation it needs in its
self-proclaimed "war on terror" by utilizing, and hyping,
the understandable fright of the American people. John
Ashcroft and Tom Ridge emerged periodically to manipulate
the public's fright by announcing yet another "terror"
threat, based on "credible but unverified" evidence. As he
departed his directorate of the Homeland Security
Department, Ridge admitted that he was required to issue
many of those "terror" warnings when there was no
justifiable reason for doing so; it has been demonstrated
(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=az7yl-UnsQQ ) that those
warnings were activated usually when the Administration was
facing an election or when they were having an especially
bad-news day -- a new scandal, especially discouraging
reports from Iraq, etc. Meanwhile, Congress (shame on you,
Democrats!) recently made most of the Patriot Act laws
permanent. Unless those can be repealed, that vote will be a
nail into the coffin housing the remains of the Bill of
Rights.

14. Outing CIA Agents for Political Reasons. The
Bush Administration, for its own crass political reasons,
compromised American national security by revealing the
identity of two key intelligence operatives -- one, CIA
agent Valerie Plame, who had important contacts in the
shadowy world of weapons of mass destruction, especially in
dealing with Iran's nuclear capabilities. It is possible
that the first of "senior Administration officials" to
reveal her identity was from the State Department (Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage), but wherever the leak
originated, it is clear that Cheney (through Libby) and
Rove deliberately piled on the Plame story in an attempt to
punish her husband for telling the world that Bush's Iraq
war was based on phony intelligence. Revealing the identity
of a covert CIA agent, not incidentally, is a felony. The
other outing of a CIA operative, by Condi Rice, apparently
to show off how successful the Administration was in its
anti-terrorism hunt, was that a high-ranking mole close to
bin Laden's inner circle. This operative could have kept the
U.S. informed as to ongoing and future plans of al-Qaida.
That's our war-on-terrorism government at work.

15. Do
You Know If Your Vote Is Counted? We know that America's
voting system and, more importantly, the vote-counting
system are corrupted. Sophisticated statistical analysis
along with wide-scale exit-polling, suggests strongly that
the 2004 election results were fiddled with by the private
companies that tally the votes. These companies are owned
by far-right Republican supporters, but the same objection
would be lodged if Democrats owned the companies. There are
no good reasons to "outsource" vote-counting to private
corporations. These are the same companies who make and
program the voting machines, who refuse to permit
inspection of their software, and whose technicians have
behaved suspiciously on election nights in 2000 in Florida,
in 2002 in Georgia, and in Ohio and Florida in 2004. And we
haven't even mentioned Rove's dirty-tricks department whose
function has been, by hook or by crook, to lower the number
of potential Democrat voters, especially minority voters; a
favorite tactic is to knock hundreds of thousands of likely
Democratic voters off the voting rolls in advance in key
states such as Florida and Ohio. Unless the vote-counting
system can be changed soon -- and the vote-tallying scandal
will not be adequately dealt with voter-verified receipts
-- the integrity of our elections will be suspect into the
far future. Even if all the other reforms were implemented,
they would mean nothing without the guarantee of honest
elections.

16. There Is No Real Economic Plan. We know
that the Bush Administration paid off its backers (and
itself) by giving humongous tax breaks, for 10 years out,
to the already wealthy and to large corporations. In
addition, corporate tax-evasion was made easier via
offshore listings and by laying off thousands of IRS
auditors of high-end returns. All this was done at a time
when the U.S. economy was in a sorry state and when the
treasury deficit from those tax-breaks was growing even
larger from Iraq/Afghanistan/"war-on-terror" costs. (Those
war costs are now closing in on half a TRILLION dollars!) So
far as we know, the Bush Administration has no plans for
how to retire that debt and no real plan (other than the
discredited "trickle-down" theory) for restarting the
economy and creating well-paying jobs for skilled workers,
many of whom have had their positions outsourced to foreign
lands.

17. Drowning Government In a Bathtub. We know that
the HardRight conservatives who control Bush policy don't
really care what kind of debt and deficits their policies
cause; in some ways, the more the better, since as GOP
honcho Grover Norquist has admitted, they want to shrink
government "down to the size where we can drown it in the
bathtub." They want to decimate and starve popular social
programs from the New Deal/Great Society eras, including,
most visibly, Head Start, Social Security, Medicare (and
real drug coverage for seniors), student loans, welfare
assistance, public education, etc. (The IRS is going to
hire private tax collectors!) Bush's plan to privatize a
huge chunk of the Social Security System is still on track,
though Republicans are keeping quiet about it prior to the
November elections.

18. Who Cares What You Drink or
Breathe? We know that Bush environmental policy -- dealing
with air and water pollution, mineral extraction, national
parks, and so on -- is an unmitigated disaster, giving
pretty much free rein to corporations whose bottom line does
better when they don't have to pay attention to the public
interest. It's the worst sort of grab-the-money-and-run
scenario. Perhaps the best worst example of the
Administration's attitude toward protecting the public's
health can be seen in the EPA giving the green light for
residents and workers to safely return to their homes and
jobs in Lower Manhattan shortly after the Twin Towers fell
five years ago, even though EPA scientists had determined
that the air was grossly polluted and dangerous.

19.
It's Greed for Money, Control, Power. We know from "insider"
memoirs and reports by former Bush Administration officials
-- Joseph DeIulio, Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, et al. --
that the public interest plays little role in the
formulation of policy inside the Bush Administration. The
motivating factors are mainly greed and ideological control
and remaining in political power. Further, they say, there
is little or no curiosity in this Administration to think
outside the political box, or even to hear other
opinions.

20. It's Faith Over Science, Myth Over Reality.
We know that this attitude -- "my mind is made up, don't
bother me with the facts" -- shows up most openly in how
science is disregarded by the Bush Administration (good
example: global warming) in favor of faith-based thinking.
Some of this non-curiosity about reality may be based in
fundamentalist religious, even Apocalyptic, beliefs. Much of
Bush's bashing of science is designed as payback to his
fundamentalist base, but the scary part is that a good
share of the time he actually seems to believe what he's
saying, about evolution vs. intelligent-design, stem-cell
research, abstinence education, censoring the rewriting of
government scientific reports that differ from the Bush
party line, cutbacks in research&development grants for the
National Science Foundation, etc., ad nauseum. This
closed-mind attitude helps explain, on a deeper level, why
things aren't working out in Iraq, or anywhere else for
that matter.

AMERICA OR GERMANY IN THE '30s?

In sum, we know that permanent-war policy abroad and
police-state tactics at home are taking us into a kind of
American fascism domestically and an imperial foreign
policy overseas. All aspects of the American polity are
infected with the militarist Know-Nothingism emanating from
the top, with governmental and vigilante-type crackdowns on
protesters, dissent, free speech, freedom of assembly
happening regularly on both the local and federal levels.
More and more, America is resembling Germany in the early
1930s, group pitted against group while the central
government amasses more and more power and control of its
put-upon citizens, and criticizing The Leader's policies is
denounced as unpatriotic or treasonous.

The good news is
that after suffering through six-plus years of the
CheneyBush presidency, the public's blinders are falling
off. The fall from power of Tom DeLay is a good symbol of
this, and the true nature of these men and their regime is
finally starting to hit home. Cheney is acknowledged as the
true power behind the throne, and Bush is seen for what he
is: an insecure, uncurious, arrogant, dangerous, dry-drunk
bully who is endangering U.S. national interests abroad with
his reckless and incompetently-managed wars, his wrecking
of the U.S. economy at home, and with his over-reaching in
all areas.

If a Democratic president and vice president
had behaved similarly to Bush and Cheney, they'd have been
in the impeachment dock in a minute.

IF REPUBLICANS
LOSE IN NOVEMBER

But there is no way for that to
happen unless and until the Republicans lose control of one
or both of the houses of Congress in the November election.
If the Dems were to take over the House, for example, they
would have subpoena power to compel witnesses to testify
under oath for the first time in nearly seven years, which
could lead to productive investigations of the machinations
that sent the U.S. to war in Iraq, to what really happened
on 9/11, to the other myriad scandals and embarrassments:
torture, domestic spying, the punishment and outing of CIA
agents for political ends, the Abramoff corruption network,
etc., etc.

The Democrats are not politically pure, to be
sure -- with too many beholden to the same interests that
have corrupted the Republicans during the CheneyBush years
-- but in enough instances that matter, they would be
different enough to start to turn the ship of state away
from its reckless, dangerous extremism and back more toward
the center and maybe even, on some issues, in the direction
of progressive liberalism.

That is why for the next
two-plus months, we need to work our butts off to ensure a
Republican defeat in the House, and, if we're lucky, in the
Senate as well -- by a huge margin. We know that Rove and
his minions will be doing everything to steal and
manipulate this election. There will be more sleaze and
slime and dirty tricks, and perhaps even some October
"surprises," and we need to factor those in and work even
harder, including sueing election officials who refuse to
take steps for honest balloting and vote-counting.
Landslide victories would make it more risky for Rove and
his minions to try to fiddle with the vote totals.

Winning in November is our job, our moral duty. If we don't
take them down in this midterm election, we may not have
another good shot for a decade or more. It's crank-it-up
time. Let's get to work.
#

*************

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international
relations, has taught at Western Washington and San Diego
State Universities, worked as a writer-editor with the San
Francisco Chronicle for 19 years, and currently co-edits
The Crisis Papers. ( http://www.crisispapers.org ) To
comment: >> crisispapers@comcast.net <First published
at The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground
8/29/06.

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